Jazz Articles about Billie Holiday

Billie Holiday Fifty Years Later: A Tribute and Reassessment

by Victor L. Schermer
July 17, 2009

Fifty years ago, on July 17, 1959, Billie Holiday died an untimely death at age 44 in a New York hospital from complications of drug and alcohol dependency. Now, half a century after her passing, it is an appropriate hommage to reflect once again on her legacy as a singer, an African American woman, a victim-- of a traumatic childhood, spousal abuse, and substance dependence--and a powerful creative force for the times she lived in. Though less of a “pop ...

Becoming Billie Holiday

by Larry Reni Thomas
March 27, 2009

Becoming Billie Holiday Carole Boston Weatherford Hardcover; 120 pages ISBN: 159078507X Wordsong Press 2008

Award-winning poet and professor Carole Boston Weatherford's latest, excellent book, Becoming Billie Holiday--a fictional verse memoir, as Weatherford describes it--reaches out and grabs the reader's attention as if Holiday herself was on stage and her entire life was unfolding before your very eyes. Weatherford's wonderful poems, which have titles from Holiday's songbook, are so ...

Billie Holiday: Lady Day: The Master Takes and Singles & Rare Live Recordings 1934-1959

by Andrew Velez
April 6, 2008

Billie Holiday Lady Day--The Master Takes and Singles Columbia-Legacy 2007 Billie Holiday Rare Live Recordings 1934-1959 ESP-Disk 2007

The earliest 11 sides on Lady Day, a quartet box of discs taken from the Grammy Award-winning 10-CD box of 2001, are among the many cuts with pianist Teddy Wilson's orchestra. Only 20 ...

Billie Holiday: Billie Holiday: Rare Live Recordings 1934-1959

by Lyn Horton
February 12, 2008

The mystique associated with musical artists who have passed away often preoccupies those who continue to maintain an avid interest in the past of those musicians. A question to ask though is: how can anyone possibly know the internal perils and joys of these intriguing artistic beings? No matter how much research is done or how much listening occurs, there is an undeniable limit to what can be discussed or interpreted.

The release of Billie Holiday: Rare Live ...

Billie Holiday: Lady Day - The Master Takes and Singles

by David Rickert
November 9, 2007

Billie Holiday Lady Day - The Master Takes And Singles Columbia Records 2007

It's fitting that singer Billie Holiday began the most celebrated part of her career with Columbia in 1933, when the country was in the throes of the depression, and ended it in 1942, when the world was gripped by war. Her anguished delivery fit in perfectly with the times. As she projected the torments of her life through music, ...

Billie Holiday: God Bless The Child: The Very Best Of Billie Holiday & Masters of Jazz

by Suzanne Lorge
April 8, 2007

Billie Holiday began singing professionally in the early 1930s and toured and recorded until her death in 1959. Her only hiatus from performing came during a 10-month stay at the Federal Woman's Reformatory in Alederton, West Virginia for drug possession in 1947. Her story reveals the symbiosis between personal pain and early jazz, and that story is best told through her recordings. Two reissues from the early and middle portions of her career show both the gradual demise of her ...

Lady Sings The Blues: The 50th Anniversary Edition

by Suzanne Lorge
February 10, 2007

Lady Sings The Blues: The 50th Anniversary Edition Billie Holiday with William Dufty Softcover; 231 pages ISBN: 978-0-7679-2386-6 Harlem Moon/Broadway Books 2006

In 1956 Billie Holiday sat down with ghostwriter William Dufty and recounted the story of her life. At times during the 224-page narrative Holiday seems compelled to justify the telling of her tale and issues rueful warnings about the dangers of drug use, as if her artistry were ...